Liquid cooling takes advantage of the key features that a larger radiator offers compared to local sinks, with the added benefit that the radiator can often be mounted in a cooler air stream.
That explains why a large radiator sits at the front of most automobiles, but in the case of overclocking, complexity and inconvenience have limited the number of liquid-cooling applications in PCs. Most liquid cooling systems focus on the CPU, since adding other components to the loop makes servicing a nightmare. In particular, removing a liquid cooling system from graphics cards requires extreme caution and plenty of extra time to drain the system, which must then be refilled and re-purged (to remove air from the water lines) before it can be used again. This could easily turn five minutes of diagnostic work into a one-hour ordeal--and that's if you know what you're doing.
Who wants to drain/re-fill this bad-boy?
But liquid cooling’s inconveniences can be more easily justified in situations where air cooling simply isn’t adequate. We’ve run into this exact problem when overclocking multi-card graphics configurations, and our December $2,500 3-Way SLI PC was the most noteworthy example. Packing three double-slot cards together limited airflow to the intake fans of the top two cards, so that cooling was barely adequate to keep up with the configuration’s stock speed. Don't even think about overclocking in that situation.
Packing devices closely together limits airflow, as seen in our SBM build.
For overclockers, the opportunity to seek significant performance gains makes liquid cooling’s troubles worthwhile, and several companies are ready to fulfill those needs. Options include buying an air-cooled card and adding an expensive liquid-cooling “water block” or purchasing a card with the water block pre-attached, such as the GeForce GTX 285 Infinity Edition from Zotac.
Liquid-cooled graphics cards typically cost around $50 less than the sum of their parts (high-end water block plus a high-spec card), so the smart money for anyone looking to water cool is to buy these parts pre-assembled. Zotac adds one more reason to purchase its product by pre-overclocking its GPU and RAM to extra-high speeds, selling the card with a warranty that home overclockers typically must sacrifice. That also means that each GTX 285 Infinity Edition is hand-selected for its ability to support the rated speeds, while the purchaser of a reference-clocked card must rely on the luck of the draw to reach similar or greater speeds.
Overclockers aren’t the only market for liquid-cooled electronics, as similar methods have been used to address airflow constraints in densely packed servers. And let’s not forget home-theater and audio-studio applications where liquid cooling allows enormous passive radiators to suffice in situations that would have otherwise called for noisy high-speed fans. All of these markets share a common goal of increased cooling capacity at reduced use of local space and these are things that even non-overclocking performance enthusiasts can appreciate.

The temperature of my 8800GTS 512 running GPU at 800Mhz (from 650MHz) + W/C southbridge and 2 X 120 Radiator. My rig maxes out at 27 Deg C above ambient.
Perhaps the chosen liquid cooling system doesn't have enough pressure.
This is obviously not the limit of water cooling, it's either the product of a very lame product, or the testers ignorance of water setups.
Currently running two q9550 and a 4870+ a 4870x2 on my loop.. never gets anything near ur single rad setup on a single card and cpu. Have never seen the temp going past 30c at home.
You guys need to invest in a decent radiator and pump if you want to test liquid cooled components. A D5 and a MCR 220 isnt that expensive.
At least Zotac used a good cooler. Much better than the garbage EVGA uses on their cards. Al+Cu=lose.
The first picture shows a case fan stating to get dusty.
The fan flaps already are white-brown.
On my city, fans become very dusty really fast. They end occluding radiators, and air vents. I even cutted out all the metal grid on the case, to reduce dust retention. but still it is catched on the metal borders.
I wish there where something to do about it. maybe some liquid or painting, or some trick to repel dust, or make it less adhesive.
(my father have a German shepper dog, and the last time I opened his case, it was completely full of dog hair.... fun)
If somebody read this, and know a fixing (not involving dogs), please, post.
Other thing I hate, is when I clean the fan cutting edge. It ends all scratched and dented. I don't know why. The rest of the flaps are not eroded, so why the flaps get dented?
I suspect that they get dented at colliding with some heavier particles, and then start catching the dust, so maybe the solution involves metallic flaps.
whoelse overclocks and adds watercooling with single-slot card?
Also I've never done water cooling before, but i would take these other comments word over the articles, that water cooling can keep temperatures a lot cooler.
A question. Does the strength of the pump havea significant effect on the cooling of the product? I would assume their is a large diminishing return after a certain amount of water pressure... hmmm thinking about it maybe not.
What were you thinking Thomas Soderstrom?
I’m not understanding how 3 OC 285’s can be out preformed by 3 stock 8800 GTX’s. Am I missing something here? Below is my system and the Bench marks I’ve run on it.
Thermaltake Tower Case Armor+
Thermaltake 1000W PSU
ASUS Striker II Extreme
Intel C2D Q9450 OC 3.2GHz
Corsair 4x2GB 1600 DDR3 Set to 1333 FBS 9,9,9,24 t2
3 EVGA 8800GTX 768MB Two SLI one PhysX
1 Seagate 250GB 32MB Cache SATA Boot Drive Vista 64 Bit
5 Seagate 250GB 32MB Cache SATA Drives Raid 5 1TB
1 Termaltake external E-SATA enclosure with Seagate 250GB 32MB Cache for Ubuntu
1 Seagate FreeAgent Extreme 1TB E-SATA to back up the Raid set.
LITE-ON SATA DVD-CD Burner
Gyration Ultra Cordless RF Mouse and Keyboard
3 Koolance 282GXT water blocks
Koolance 330 CPU cooler
Koolance External EHX-1020SL 3 fan radiator
Koolance Internal RP-1000 reservoir and pump
24” Acer Monitor
Turtle Beach Ear Force 5.1 Headphones
Momo Racing Force Feedback Wheel and Racing Pedals
Ideazon Fang Gamepad
Logitech Dual Action Gamepad
Patent Pending Computer Gaming Table
I’ll start with the FutureMark Bench marks all in default settings, and very depending on the graphics driver your using at the time.
3DMark03 71647
3DMark05 19292
3DMark06 16322
3DVantage 20520
All game benches are in 1920x1200 max setting except for Crysis which I will start with. Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Lost Coast, Lost Planet, UT 2004, UT3, Farcry, Farcry 2, are 64 bit; I don’t know if which other games come in a 64 bit version. I tried to use bench mark software written for the game I ran bench marks for and for others I used Fraps to estimate an average.
Crysis Very High 8xAA GPU 27.01
4xAA 29.72
2xAA 33.14
0xAA 38.49
Crysis Very High 0xAA CPU 38.02
Crysis Very High 0xAA 34.98 Harbor
Crysis Warhead 0xAA 45.00 Enthusiasts
Lost Coast 134.04
HL2 150.0
Lost Planet Snow 86.7 Cave 86.2
UT3 238.0
Prey 115
Call to Juarez 31.3
Fear 174
Fear XP 155
Fear PM 179
SS2 166.3
ETQW Capt at 60
Quake 4 Capt at 60
Doom 3 Capt at 60
Fallout 3 Capt at 60
Dead Space Capt at 30
The next games I could only estimate using fraps.
Bioshock 130
Time Shift 130
Fear 2 130
Jericho 40
Portal 200
MassEffect 60
Call of Duty 2 250
Call of Duty 4 150
The only game I play with AA off is Crysis and I really don’t notice any deferent’s when I’m playing it. I think it will take another huge leap ahead from Nvidia, as with the 8800 GTX, to over come AA and higher resolutions playability with Crysis. I think this machine is good for another five years or more.
Article clearly states that both cards were overclocked to their respective limits. So what does that say about your comments?
The Zotac GTX 285 Infinity IS a single-slot card. It happens to be a single-slot card with a double-slot bracket.
Zotac sells a single-slot water cooled GTX-285 with a double slot bracket, so if you use 3 of them you loose six expansion slots. BFG sells the same card and cooler combo with a single-slot bracket, so if you use three of them you still have 3 or 4 expansion slots left.
If both cards are otherwise equal, BFG wins giving you space to put your OTHER cards.
But it looks like both cards may not be otherwise equal, because Zotac gets some awesome memory overclocks from its card.
Unlike BFG, Zotac does not include 1/2" barbs with its card. The 3/8" barbs would have put a restriction on the liquid cooling system used for the CPU and left-over Swiftech 1/2" barbs had a different thread, so a separate liquid cooler was used.
Concerning the GPU clocks being stuck, a card that operates perfectly at its shipped speed (722 MHz GPU, 1584 Shader) but cannot operate stably at the next step up, that normally indicates a "stuck" card regardless of whether or not the GPU temp reached into the 70's. That is to say, you'd think the card would go at least 732 MHz if it wasn't stuck, but it didn't. Having a card's factory overclock and a separate liquid cooler's limits be an exact match would be a coincidence too rare to consider.
You also missed mentioning the fan speed of the OCed air cooled card, was it left to the auto settings? or crancked up? If so, what noise the infamous reference cooler produced?
I can't deny it. This substandard article feels out of place when compared to other TH articles.